Live data from Hacker News

If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

wsj.com

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#361
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, there was a self-decribed cabal of sorts that worked to change election laws, curtail protests, and pressure social media companies leading up to the 2020 election. Whether what they did was in any way illicit or undermines the integrity of U.S. elections is of course up for debate, but the fact that a secret coordinated effort of powerful people "conspired" (if you will) to influence the outcome of…

That's not fair, that's just some unrelated thing...

Yeah, different cabal.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#362
post #125

Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…

I just experienced something similar to this and it makes me wonder if much of this is just perception. We recently dealt with an out of state builder pushing to have a property that was zoned Neighborhood Commercial to be rezoned to something more flexible so that he could build 49 town homes with 49 parking spots on 5 acres of land. Everybody opposed the rezoning and fought to defeat it. The project would have been…

To me, the issue depends in large part on the context: What kind of area are you in? Rural? Urban? And what is the availability of housing and the economic diversity of the neighborhood?

I don't think it's useful to try to determine if some loaded, politicized, pejorative term applies by definition.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#363
post #81
post #16

This is what happens when you keep printing money and keep mortgage rates incredibly low. All that money's gotta go somewhere. Hey, at least the CPI isn't going up right? Its only the most expensive thing in most people's lives that has doubled in cost in about 10 years. Same thing for stock prices, and slowly other commodity prices are catching up as well. Non-homeowners are being shafted by this fed/ecb policy. Eve…

Right now interest rates are low, they cannot use them as a tool in a crisis, for this reason they are printing money to lower the overall debt obligation of the US. Inflating away our debt. This will eventually lead to inflation at which point the interest rates will rise again (prediction, at the end of the decade). This is the correct play for where we are in the long term debt cycle. In my opinion, this is happen…

> for this reason they are printing money to lower the overall debt obligation of the US

Except the way the US does it, the Treasury issues debt and then the Fed prints to buy the debt. So when we print $1T, we also take on $1T in debt. I know you mean lowering through inflation but as long as it's done this way I don't see how it matters. If the dollar looses 50%, we then need to issue $2T in debt and print $2T the next time.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost me at the end. You lack political acumen if you think this is how politics works: " If there's a credible threat to build plenty of housing, they'll move on." The Yimbies supported Mayor Breed. She hasn't changed the political problems in SF that you're (for the most part, accurately) diagnosing here. The problem with most anti-activist government screeds like this is that they lack the same nuance and sophi…

Since you understand politics so well you understand Mayor Breed can't unilaterally write housing policy. She has to work with the Board of Supervisors. The Board is dominated by a group of politicians that aren't really YIMBY supported as far as I know.

Since your reading comprehension is so high, you'll agree then that supporting yimby groups won't be sufficient to generate the credible threat that the original comment suggests will be sufficient to dissuade investors

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old person would have sold the house a long time ago because of the rise of their property tax. They wouldn’t be millionaires. They would have to sell their home for a small gain and then rent for the rest of their lives. And since they are old they have no income so they need to keep moving to cheaper and cheaper apartments. Sounds like a great way to live a life, just because younger people feel like they deser…

If their property taxes increased to the point where they cannot afford it, then that means that their property value increased significantly. Excuse me if I don't feel too bad for somebody who just reaped a massive windfall. The "won't somebody think of granny?" argument doesn't really work when advocating for a policy that disproportionately subsidizes non-grannies.

The greatest day of my life will be the day I owe the IRS $1 million dollars.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#366
post #32

If only so many people didn't treat land and houses like investments, there wouldn't be such a disastrous hoarding problem. Henry George's Land Value Tax [1][2] seems like an obvious economic fix that would require a large fraction of the population to change how they think about land and natural resources, but most of them are invested in such a way (i.e. owning multiple houses on multiple parcels of land, often wit…

> Everybody works but the vacant lot. I paid $3600 for this lot and will hold 'till I get $6000. The profit is unearned increment made possible by the presence of this community and enterprise of its people. I take the profit without earning it. for the remedy read Henry George. - Billboard posted in an empty lot, Rockford Illinois, 1914

That's a common meme - that asset appreciation is unearned wealth.

But it's not.

That investor could've spent the 3600 on hookers and blackjack.

Investors freezing their money in communities in the form of real estate or other investment is a key part of those communites becoming richer and more complex.

There's a real risk of losing your money - there's no worse financial nightmare than holding real estate that you're trying to sell for years... but no-one is buying

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#367

Things went off the rails at the end... > Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth? You are fucked. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402449561864577024 IMO, weakens the entire 'thread' and m…

The main reason the homes are being bought up is the lumber and steal costs. Right now, it would cost me $500k to build a house that last year would cost me $190k. Real quotes I got for a possible build. More details on what I’m seeing here: https://austingwalters.com/stagflation-is-here-monetary-infl... With that being the case and the dollar appearing to be weakening, it makes since for them to buy anything they ca…

The point about lumber is accurate. We are getting a fence built for our house, and our contractor says the lumber has gone from $12 a board to $28 a board over the last few months. He's had to revise his estimates upward lest he lose money on the job.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, cabal is a strong word and the election stealing/truth hiding is certainly off the rails in my opinion as well. But here's some perhaps interesting information on top 5 shareholders of largest US banks [1]: JP Morgan Chase: Blackrock 6.4 Vanguard 4.7 State Street 4.5 Blackrock 2.7 Blackrock 2.5 Bank of America: Berkshire 6.9 Blackrock 5.3 Vanguard 4.5 state street 4.3 Fidelity 2.1 Citigroup: Blackrock 6.1 Vanguar…

Aren't most of these holdings through funds? It's not Blackrock, Vanguard or Fidelity that's holding those shares, it's people and institutions who are investing in their funds.

Blackrock Vanguard et al have tremendous influence as shareholders even if it's via an index fund... see what they did to Exxon Mobil a few weeks ago!

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "they"? Some article in a newspaper? A handful of researchers and futurists? Edit: Got it. It's from a list of unsurprising predictions from [at least] the marketing department of the World Economic Forum. Thanks.

WEF's official video [1]. They took down the article they had on this topic, probably due to backlash [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBBxWtKKQiA [2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-real...

No offense, and I'll take the downvotes for being blunt, but this is political nonsense that doesn't belong on HN: people aren't going to to buy into a particular group's Proper Noun'd Concept off _obvious_ hyperbole (who actually thinks property, as a concept, is going away) that was apparently erased once it was used to hyperbole and wish a Proper Noun political concept into being.
Post reply on HN